Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  Until one afternoon at the tenth setting sun, they’d finally come to the clearing in the jungle where the train yard was. The clearing was not a yard but also not a proper station. It was a waiting-place of some sort, more like hospital emergency rooms, because the people there were not waiting the way people usually wait for a train. With a little fear and a little relief, the children saw countless people lingering and loitering, men and women, either alone or in groups, some other children, a few elderly, all waiting for help, for answers, for anything they might be offered. There amid those strangers, they found a spot, stretched out tarp tatters and old blankets, reached into their backpacks for water, nuts, a Bible, a sack of green marbles.

  Once they were settled in, the man in charge told them not to move from their spot and drifted to a nearby town, strayed in and out of taverns, to and from sad whores and motel beds, snorting long white trails lined up on a pewter dish, short bumps on a credit card, flakes inside a crack in a wooden bar; he’d fallen into stubborn arguments and asked for another drink, dispensing bills and demanding services, hurling insults, then advice, then apologies at sudden foes and instant fellows until, finally, he fell asleep, openmouthed, on an aluminum table, a string of his saliva meandering like a lazy river between domino tiles and cigarette ash. Above him, an airplane passes, leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky.

  In the meantime, the children waited. They sat butt-flat on yard gravel among strangers, or ventured a little between tracks, and waited with the others. Though not everyone in the yard, they noticed, was waiting for a train. There were food vendors, who accepted as little as five cents in exchange for a reused water bottle and a loaf of buttered bread. There were garment traders, letter writers, lice pickers, and ear cleaners, but also priests with long black robes reading words from inside Bibles, fortune-tellers, entertainers, and penitents. With their eyes and ears, they followed a grim young man who warned them and anyone else willing to listen: “Alive enter you, exit you a mummy.” Waving a half-missing arm wrapped in soiled bandages, he repeated his deathly sentence like a curse on the children, but he delivered it with a wide-open smile while balancing on a track, heel-toe and heel-toe, looking a little like the circus funambulists in the children’s towns, before their towns had been abandoned and the circuses no longer passed through.

  Later, they saw a shamefaced penitent who long ago had planted a seed in a little mound of soil on the palm of his hand, and the seed had become a small tree, and its roots now clutched and twisted around his outstretched hand and forearm. One girl had almost paid the penitent five cents to let her touch the miracle tree, but the others had restrained her, said don’t be gullible, it’s all a trick.

  An old blind man had approached them near nightfall and sat with them in silence for a while. Before leaving, though, he’d stood in front of them like a retired schoolmaster and murmured instructions in the dark. They were complicated and confusing instructions, about the trains they’d ride during the journey ahead. He, like the rest of the yard people, knew that the safest train cars to ride were the gondolas. He told them the tank cars were round and slippery, the boxcars were almost always closed and locked, and the hopper cars were a deathtrap you’d climb into and rarely climb back out of. He said the train would come one day soon, and they should pick a gondola. Don’t think of home, don’t think of people, gods, or consequences, he’d told them. Don’t pray or talk or wish anything. And before bowing goodbye, the old blind man had pointed toward some distant star and said, “Thence outward and away,” and repeated, “Thence outward and away.” Then he’d vanished into the dark.

  At sunrise the next day, the man in charge had not come back. Those who came were the chanting men and women who flocked in opportunistic bands of threes or fives between the groups of waiting travelers, offering shoe repairs for cheap, and cloth-mending for almost nothing. They chanted, twenty-five cents for rubber soles, twenty-five cents for superglue on rubber soles, chanted, twenty, twenty for leather, twenty for hammer and nail service on leather soles, chanted, fifteen, fifteen for cosmetic repairs and needlework.

  One of the boys, boy four, paid a man fifteen cents to patch a hole on the flank of his boot with a square piece of fabric cut out from the sleeve of his own canvas jacket. The rest of the children called him an idiot, called him retarded, called him a mule, said he should have sold the jacket or traded it for something better instead. Now he had a patched shoe and a torn jacket, they said, and what good were they? But he knew that the boots had been new while the jacket was an old hand-me-down, so he quietly swallowed their disapproval and looked the other way.

  The man in charge still had not returned when the morning had passed and the yellowing light of the afternoon was falling, almost pleasant, on the train yard. The children were playing with some marbles one had brought when a scrotum-faced woman, neck speckled with warts and stray hair, and eyes like a welcome mat on which too many shoes had been wiped, appeared out of the shadows before them and grabbed for their palms, foretelling demented bits of stories that they could not afford to hear complete:

  “I see a wine-red glow in the shallows, boy.”

  “By a rock-pool, you, young man, will grow logy with vine-must.”

  “They’ll buy you, little tiny one, for a little slave-money, while the rest go northward.”

  “And you, girl. You’ll glow like a dying firefly inside a glass cage.”

  She promised to tell them the rest of the stories for fifty cents each, which was double the cost of shoe repairs. And if they wished her to intercept fortune in their favor, it would cost seventy-five cents, which was many times more than a whole serving of water and bread. So though they’d wanted to hear more, they’d forced themselves to avoid the witch-woman’s eyes, had pretended not to believe all the ill omens uttered from between her leathery lips.

  When they’d finally managed to ushh her away, she’d cursed them all in a brutal foreign tongue, and before disappearing into the parallel lines of the tracks, she’d turned around once more toward them, whistled, and thrown a ripe orange in their direction. The orange hit one boy on the arm, boy seven, then landed in the gravel without rolling.

  Though curious and also desperately hungry, they’d dared not touch it. Others like them, after them, perhaps sensed the same dark something in that strange fruit, because days and then weeks passed and the orange remained there, round, untouched, molding green and showing white rings on the outside, fermenting first sweet and then bitter inside, then gradually blackening, shrinking, shriveling, until it disappeared into the gravel during a long midsummer rainstorm.

  The only yard people who didn’t curse, didn’t trick, didn’t ask for anything in return were three young girls with long obsidian braids who carried buckets of powdered magnesium. For free, the three girls offered to tend to the children’s ravaged feet, the heels and balls pulpy and bursting open like boiled tomatoes. The girls sat beside them and reached their cupped hands into metal buckets. They powdered the children’s soles and insteps, and later used tattered cloths or scraps of towels to wrap ripped skin. They used pumice stones to reduce tough calluses, careful not to rub the skin raw, and massaged contracted calf muscles with their small but firm thumbs. They offered to puncture bellying blisters using a sterilized needle. “See the small flame of this match?” one of them said, and then explained that when the flame touched the needle, the needle got clean. And last, the youngest of the bucket-girls, the one with the best eyes—big black almonds—showed the children a set of contorted metal hangers and a pair of large clippers that she pulled from inside her bucket, and with them offered to relieve the deeper, more desperate pain of ingrown or half-hanging toenails.

  Only one boy, boy six, said yes, yes please. He was not one of the younger ones, nor was he the eldest. He had seen the large clippers offered to him and had remembered the lobsters. He remembered his gran
dfather walking out of the sea on unsteady twiggy legs, carrying the lobsters inside a net mended twice or thrice with double knots and drops of candle wax. The old man would stand by the shore, his back curved forward to balance the weight of the catch, and call out his name. Always he had run to the shore at his grandfather’s call, offered to carry the net for him. And as they made their way from the hard, wet sands nearer to the shore toward the dry, higher dunes, and then crossed the road and boarded the passenger bus, he would peek now and then into the net. He’d observe that death-nest of lobsters crawling over lobsters, speculating how much will we earn, counting how many did we catch, watching the little beasts opening and closing their pincher claws as if they were all uttering sad thoughts to one another in sign language.

  He had never thought very highly of the lobsters they caught—those slow, dumb, but eager and somewhat sexual sea monsters that they would later sell in the food market for ten coins apiece. Yet now he remembered them and missed their smell of salt and rot, their perfectly articulated small bodies inching pointlessly inside the wobbly, concave net. So when the girl showed him the clippers, he raised his hand and waved, and she came and kneeled in front of him and held the clippers to his toes and looked into his eyes and told him don’t worry, though she was worried, and her hands trembled a little. The boy closed his eyes and thought of his grandfather’s bony brown feet, their swollen veins and yellowing toenails. Then, when the metal instrument pierced first hesitantly, then more firmly into his skin, he wailed and cursed and bit his lower lip. The girl felt the resolve of determination layering over her fear as she pierced the skin, and her hands stopped trembling. She deftly clipped and cut the broken toenail, biting her lower lip, too, in concentration or perhaps with empathy. In his mind, the boy cursed her while she cut and twisted, but in the end, he opened his eyes and wanted to thank her, teary and embarrassed, looking up into her steady black eyes. He did not say anything when she said she was all done, and wished him good luck, and told him to always wear socks, but he smiled.

  He searched for her the next morning, when the children finally boarded the gondola and the train departed, but in the sea of faces in the distancing train yard, he recognized no one.

  TOGETHER ALONE

  As I get into bed and curl around my husband’s sweaty back, I can still hear the echoes of these other children, somewhere. I hear the monotonous sound of thousands of lost footsteps, and a dim chorus of voices, weaving in and out of the sentences, swiftly shifting perspectives in the slow, heavy rhythm of the narrative voice, and as I try to fall asleep, I know that this life is mine, and also, at the same time, irremediably lost.

  What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread, sometimes absentmindedly, other times in a kind of rapture, recording it; and now I am reading parts to the boy. And then there’s also the story of the real lost children, some of whom are about to board a plane. There are many other children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers. There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally, there are my own children, one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are now always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes, riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.

  As my husband feels my body close to his, deep in his sleep, he inches away, so I turn the other way and curl up around my pillow. A kind of future self looks at all this in quiet recognition: what I once had. No self-pity, no desire, just a kind of astonishment. And I fall asleep with the same question the boy asked me earlier:

  What happens if children are left alone?

  BEDS

  The question comes back, more as a presentiment than as a question, early the next morning, as we pack to leave and prepare for the drive ahead of us to the airport near Roswell. I notice a urine stain on the children’s bedsheets before we check out of the inn and jump in the car, but I don’t ask the boy or the girl whose it is.

  I wet my bed until I was twelve. And I wet it, especially, between the ages of ten and twelve. When I turned ten years old, exactly the boy’s age, my mother left us—my father, my sister, and me—to join a guerrilla movement in southern Mexico. The three of us moved to Nigeria for my father’s work. For many years after that day, I hated politics, and anything to do with politics, because politics had taken my mother away. For years, I was angry with her, incapable of understanding why politics and other people and their movements were more important to her than us, her family. A couple of years later, right after my twelfth birthday, I saw her again. As a birthday present, or maybe just as a general reunification present, she got my sister and me plane tickets to travel to Greece with her, which I guess was kind of halfway between Mexico and Lagos. Our father helped us pack our bags and drove us to the airport: our mother would be waiting for us in the Athens airport. On our first day in Athens, she told us she wanted to take us to the Apollo Temple at the Oracle of Delphi. So we jumped on a local bus. As we found our seats, complaining about the lack of leg space and the heat, she told us that in Greek, the word for being taken somewhere by a bus was μεταφέρω, or metaphor, so we should feel lucky about being metaphored to our next destination. My sister was more satisfied than I was with the explanation that we had been given.

  We traveled many hours toward the oracle. All the while, on the way there, our mother spoke to us about the strength and power of the Pythonesses, the priestesses of the temple, who in ancient times served as the vehicles of the oracle by allowing themselves to be filled with ενθουσιασμός, or enthusiasm. I remember the definition my mother gave of the term, breaking it down into its parts. Making a kind of cutting gesture with her hands, one palm as board and the other as knife, she said: “En, theos, seismos,” which means something like “in, god, earthquake.” I think I still remember it because I didn’t know, till that day, that words could be cut up into parts like that to be understood better. Then she explained that enthusiasm was a kind of inner earthquake produced by allowing oneself to be possessed by something larger and more powerful, like a god or goddess.

  As we rode on toward the oracle, my mother spoke to us about her decision, some years earlier, to leave us, her family, and join a political movement. My sister asked her difficult, sometimes aggressive questions. Although she loved my father, my mother explained, she had been following him around all her life, always putting her own projects aside. And after years of doing that, she had finally felt an inner “earthquake,” something that stirred her deeply and maybe even shattered a part of her, and had decided to go out and find a way to fix all the brokenness. Perhaps not fix it, but at least understand it. The bus wound up and down the mountain road toward Delphi, and my mother tried to answer our questions as best she could. I asked her about where she had slept all that time she had been gone, what she had eaten, if she’d felt afraid, and if so, afraid of what. I wanted to ask her if she’d had lovers and boyfriends, but I didn’t. I listened to her speak, looking up at her face and studying the many lines of her worried forehead, her straight nose and her big ears, from which hung long earrings, dangling back and forth with the rocking movements of the bus. At times, as the bus climbed on, I closed my eyes and rested my cheek against her bare arm, smelling it, trying to take in all the old scents of her skin.

  When we finally got to Delphi and got off the bus, the access to the temple and oracle was already closed. We had arrived too late. That often happened if you traveled with my mother: you arrived too late. She suggested we break in, climb over the fence and see the oracle anyway. My sister and I obeyed, trying to pretend that we enjoyed this kind of adventure. We all climbed over the fence, and started walking through a forest. We didn’t get too far. Soon, we started hearing a terrifying dog-bark, and the
n more barks, all getting closer to us, from multiple dogs, surely a large pack, savage. So we ran back to the fence, climbed back out, and waited on the side of the road for the night bus that would take us back to Athens. Behind us, on the other side of the fence, five or six mean-looking dogs barked at us still.

  That encounter with our mother, although it was a failed adventure, planted a seed in me that would later, as I grew older, flower into a deeper understanding of things. Of things both personal and political and how the two got confused; and about my mother in particular and about women more generally. Or perhaps the right word is not understanding, which has a passive connotation. Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness. I hope my children, too, will forgive me, forgive us, one day, for the choices we make.

  TRIANGLES

  On the radio, we listen to a longer report on child refugees. We had decided not to listen to any more news about this, not when our children were awake. But the recent developments, and in particular the story about the children to be deported near Roswell, now thrust me back into the urgency of the world outside our car.

  They are interviewing an immigration lawyer, who is trying to make a case to defend the children who will be sent back to Tegucigalpa later that day. I listen for any hint, any bit of information on exactly when and where the deportation will take place.

  They don’t give any details, but I use the back of a receipt to take down the lawyer’s name, a name they’ve repeated a few times already. Then I search for her on the internet while she explains that if the children are Mexican, they are immediately removed, deported back. But if they are Central American, she says, immigration law has it that they have a right to a hearing. So this deportation is illegal, she concludes. I find the lawyer’s name and email address on a page of a small nonprofit organization based in Texas, and I email her. Polite introduction, a few sentences about why I’m contacting her, and my only urgent question: